Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Enterprise Architecture: Indian Outsourcing and Paying Dues
Imagine what would happen if Enterprise Architects started to look at and more importantly measure the quality of the software being written by Indian outsourcing firms vs attempting to present chock-a-block eye candy Powerpoint to the business...
Enterprise Architecture is most frequently discussed in context of process and all the wonderful comprehensive documentation that emerges but almost is never used. What if we were to instead think about Enterprise Architecture where those practicing it adopted the notion of stewardship?
I suspect you will find that when you outsourced the maintenance of your critical enterprise applications, the functionality that the business desires is implemented albeit in a slower manner than onshore delivery. You may also find that system qualities such as scalability, defects per lines of code and so on are rapidly increasing. Luckily, most Enterprise Architects don't have enough technical savvy to measure and therefore folks in India are safe for now.
I wonder why folks no longer think about the notion of paying dues. The process of doing actual work and gaining thereby actual experience. It provides an opportunity for a newcomer (most folks in India) to demonstrate the competence and work habits necessary to be accepted by the old-timers (the analogy is to the dues one pays to be the member of a club).
Also sometimes said of a certain obligatory suffering in connection with some endeavor. For programmers, this is the business of actually writing application code and seeing it through to implementation. The suffering part could be said to be that period of time one spends as a maintenance coder supporting other people's code. The expected result of this is the accrual of certain wisdom and perspective with regard to design and execution of software engineering projects.
I wonder how many Enterprise Architects continue to discriminate against Americans where they will desire ten years of experience yet don't put the same constraints on Indian counterparts...
| | View blog reactionsEnterprise Architecture is most frequently discussed in context of process and all the wonderful comprehensive documentation that emerges but almost is never used. What if we were to instead think about Enterprise Architecture where those practicing it adopted the notion of stewardship?
I suspect you will find that when you outsourced the maintenance of your critical enterprise applications, the functionality that the business desires is implemented albeit in a slower manner than onshore delivery. You may also find that system qualities such as scalability, defects per lines of code and so on are rapidly increasing. Luckily, most Enterprise Architects don't have enough technical savvy to measure and therefore folks in India are safe for now.
I wonder why folks no longer think about the notion of paying dues. The process of doing actual work and gaining thereby actual experience. It provides an opportunity for a newcomer (most folks in India) to demonstrate the competence and work habits necessary to be accepted by the old-timers (the analogy is to the dues one pays to be the member of a club).
Also sometimes said of a certain obligatory suffering in connection with some endeavor. For programmers, this is the business of actually writing application code and seeing it through to implementation. The suffering part could be said to be that period of time one spends as a maintenance coder supporting other people's code. The expected result of this is the accrual of certain wisdom and perspective with regard to design and execution of software engineering projects.
I wonder how many Enterprise Architects continue to discriminate against Americans where they will desire ten years of experience yet don't put the same constraints on Indian counterparts...
